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Ford will lead market-share gainers in the U.S. auto industry between now and 2015, picking up 0.8 percent of the market, while General Motors recovers a 0.5-percent share gain and Toyota picks up 0.3 percent of the market in the same time frame, according to the latest version of an exhaustive annual prognosis by a veteran securities analyst.

Meanwhile, Nissan, Honda and Chrysler will stand pat in terms of share of a recovering American auto sector, predicts John Murphy, analyst for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, in the annual analysis he calls Car Wars. European brands also will only maintain the status quo. But Korean brands risk losing 0.5 percent of their recently hard-won share in Murphy's outlook for three years hence.

In the case of each individual brand and across the industry, Murphy argued, share gains and losses will continue to be driven by how thoroughly and quickly each automaker is refreshing its product lineup. Other industry studies have broadly agreed with the thesis that new products do more to drive sales and gain incremental share than any other factor, by far. And on that criterion, Murphy said in a conference call on Wednesday, the industry as a whole will continue to perform better.

"It's a good harbinger for the industry at large," Murphy said, because product-launch activity should accelerate beginning with the current model year through the 2016 model year following a three-year relative lull as auto brands operating in the U.S. battled the Great Recession, the natural disaster in Japan and other factors.

Murphy wrote in the report that "replacement rate [of new products] drives showroom age, which drives market share, which in turn drives profits and stock prices." All of those factors, he said, should be strong over the next three years.

Yet overall, he said, major industry players are clustering together, at a higher rate of frequency, in terms of the pace of their new-product introductions.

"Over the next four years," he wrote, the industry "will replace 90 percent of its volume based on 2011 industry volumes. We estimate that a relatively low level of disparity in replacement rates will result in smaller market-share shifts in the future.

"This differs greatly from the last few decades where large shifts were the norm."

As a group, Murphy asserted, the Detroit Three will be the only gainers in the U.S. market among the major national automaker groups over the next few years, driven in large part by their "increase[d] focus on product and improve[ment] in relative competitiveness."

And while the recovery of Japanese brands in general this year, from the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, will help Toyota, Honda and Nissan recover share they lost last year to just about all of their competitors, their relative paucity of new products as a group during the next few years basically will stall their market-share gains at whatever they have accomplished so far this year, Murphy argued.

Specifically, he predicted, Ford will add 0.8 percentage point of U.S. market share by the 2015 model year, rising to 16 percent from its actual share of 15.3 percent during 2012 to date, during which time the company has lost 1.3 percentage points compared with a year ago, in part due to the renaissance of Japanese competitors.

"Ford is hitting its stride and getting more diligent about leveraging its common global platforms," Murphy told conference-call participants. "They're focusing on growing segments of the market. Their product cadence is very solid."